Les Johnson - Going Interstellar

I know lots more, although not who killed the Twenty-first DL, if anybody did, and so I pick at that worry a lot.

In old spectals and palm pix, starship captains sit at helms where they can see the Empty Vast out windows or screens. Captain Xao, First Officer Nima Photrang, and their crew keep us all cruising toward Gliese 581 in a closed cockpit in the upper central third of the big tin can that’s strut-shipping us to Guge.

This section we call Kham Bay. Cut flowers in thin vials prettify the room where Xao and Photrang and crew sit to work. This pit also has a hanging of the Kalachakra Mandala and a big painted figure of the Buddha wearing a body, a man’s and a woman’s, with huge lots of faces and arms. Larry calls this window-free pit a control room and a shrine.

I guess he knows.

I visit the cockpit. No one stops me. I visit because Simon and Karen Bryn have gone back to their Siestaville to pod-lodge for many months on Amdo Bay’s bottom level. Me, I stay my ghostly self. I owe it to everybody aboard—or so I often get told—to grow into my full Lamahood.

“Ah,” says Captain Xao, “you wish to fly Kalachakra . Great, Your Holiness.”

But he passes me to First Officer Photrang, a Tibetan who looks manlike in her jumpsuit but womanlike at her wrists and hands—so gentle about the eyes that, drifting near because our AG’s gone out, she seems to have just pulled off a hard black mask.

“What may I do for you, Greta Bryn?”

My lips won’t move, so grateful am I she didn’t say, “Your Holiness.”

She shows me the console where she watches the fuel level in a drop-tank behind our tin cylinder as this tank feeds the antimatter engine pushing us outward. Everything, she says, depends on electronic systems that run ‘virtually automatically,’ but she and other crew must check closely, even though the systems have ‘fail-safes’ to signal them from afar if they leave the control shrine.

“How long,” I ask, “before we get to Guge?”

“In nineteen years we’ll start braking,” Nima Photrang says. “In another four, if all goes as plotted, we will enter the Gliese 581 system and soon take a stationary orbital position above the terminator. From there we’ll go down to the adjacent habitable zones that we intend to settle in and develop.”

“Four years to brake!” No one’s ever said such a thing to me before. Four years are half the number I’ve lived, and no adult, I think, feels older at their ancient ages than I do at eight.

“Greta Bryn, to slow us faster than that would put terrible stress on our strut-ship. Its builders assembled it with optimal lightness, to save on fuel, but also with sufficient mass to withstand a twentieth of a g during its initial four years of thrusting and its final four years of deceleration. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but—”

“Listen: It took the Kalachakra four years to reach a fifth of the speed of light. During that time, we traveled less than half a light year and burned a lot of the fuel in our drop tanks. Jettisoning the used-up tanks lightened us. For seventy-nine years since then, we’ve coasted, cruising over sixteen light-years toward our target sun but using our fuel primarily for trajectory correction maneuvers. That’s a highly economical expenditure of the antimatter ice with which we began our flight.”

“Good,” I say—because Officer Photrang looks at me as if I should clap for such an ‘economical expenditure.’

“Anyway, we scheduled four years of braking at one twentieth of a g to conserve our final fuel resources and to keep this spidery vessel from ripping apart at higher rates of deceleration.”

“But it’s still going to take so long!”

The officer takes me to a ginormous sketch of our strut-ship. “If anyone aboard has time for a stress-reducing deceleration, Greta Bryn, you do.”

“Twenty-three years!” I say. “I’ll turn thirty-one!”

“Yes, you’ll wither into a pitiable crone.” Before I can protest more, she shows me other stuff: a map of the inside of our passenger can, a holocircle of the Gliese 581 system, and a d-cube of her living mama and daddy in the village Drak, which means Boulder, fifty-some rocky miles southeast of Lhasa. But—I’m such a dodo bird!—maybe they no longer live at all.

“My daddy’s from Boulder!” I say to overcoat this thought.

Officer Photrang peers at me with small bright eyes.

“Boulder, Colorado,” I tell her.

“Is that so?” After a nod from Captain Xao, she guides me into a tunnel lit by little glowing pins.

“What did you really come up here to learn, child? I’ll tell you if I can.”

“Who killed Sakya Gyatso?” I hurry to add, “I don’t want to be him.”

“Who told you somebody killed His Holiness?”

“Larry.” I grab a guide rail. “My tutor, Lawrence Rinpoche.”

Nima Photrang snorts. “Larry has a bad humor sense. And he may be wrong.”

I float up. “But what if he’s right?”

“Is the truth that important to you?” She pulls me down.

A question for a question, like a dry seed poked under my gum. “Larry says that a lama in training must quest for truth in everything, and I must do so always, and everyone else, by doing that too, will clean the universe of lies.”

“‘Do as I say and not as I do.’”

“What?”

Nima—she tells me to call her by this name—takes my arm and swims me along the tunnel to a door that opens at a knuckle bump. She guides me into her rooms, a closet with a pull-down rack and straps, a toadstool unit for our shipboard intranet, and a corner for talking in. We float here. Nicely, or so it seems, she pulls a twist of brindle hair out of my eye.

“Child, it’s possible that Sakya Gyatso had a heart attack.”

“Possible?”

“That’s the official version, which Minister T told all us ghosts up-phase enough to notice that Sakya had gone missing.”

I think hard. “But the unofficial story is …somebody killed him?”

“It’s one unofficial story. In the face of uncertainty, child, people indulge their imaginations, and more versions of the truth pop up than you can slam a lid on. But lid-slamming, we think, is a bad response to ideas that will come clear in the oxygen of free inquiry.”

“Who do you mean, ‘we’?”

Nima shows a little smile. “My ‘we’ excludes anyone who forbids the expression of plausible alternatives to any ‘official version.’”

“What do you think happened?”

“I’d best not say.”

“Maybe you need some oxygen.”

This time her smile looks a bit realer. “Yes, maybe I do.”

“I’m the new Dalai Lama, probably, and I give you that oxygen, Nima. Tell me your idea, now.”

After two blinks, she does: “I fear that Sakya Gyatso killed himself.”

“The Dalai Lama?” I can’t help it: her idea insults the man, who, funnily, now breathes inside me.

“Why not the Dalai Lama?”

“A Bodhisattva lives for others. He’d never kill anybody, much less himself.”

“He stayed up-phase too much—almost half a century—and the anti-aging effects of ursidormizine slumber, which he often avoided as harmful to his leadership role, were compromised. His Holiness did have the soul of a Bodhisattva, but he also had an animal self. The wear to his body broke him down, working on his spirit as well as his head, and doubts about his ability to last the rest of our trip niggled at him, as did doubts about his fitness to oversee our colonization of Guge.”

I cross my arms. This idea insults the late DL. It also, I think, poisons me. “I believe he had a heart attack.”